Gandhi & Churchill (86 page)

Characteristically, Churchill’s first instinct was to go to India himself. He announced to the cabinet that he would personally hammer out an understanding with Gandhi and other leaders on a national assembly, which would create a constitution for India after the war. Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office thought the idea “brilliantly imaginative and bold.” Eden and his private secretary Oliver Harvey agreed. Churchill was “the only person who could do it all…What a decision to take, and how gallant of the old boy himself.”
⁴⁵

But then they joined the sixty-seven-year-old prime minister for lunch. They watched him consume his usual pre-luncheon whiskeys, several bottles of beer, three glasses of port, and three brandies afterward.
⁴⁶
The bizarre image of Churchill sitting down to a meal of lentils and goat’s milk at Sevagram while Gandhi twirled his charkha must have crossed their minds. Was Churchill really up to the challenges of thrashing out the future of the subcontinent with the likes of Gandhi and Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, arguing at length day after day, with the future of the empire—not to mention Churchill’s own reputation and the course of the war—on the line?

Given Churchill’s failing heart, his doctor opposed the trip, but Churchill was adamant. Only the fall of Singapore forced Churchill first to postpone, then finally to cancel, the trip that would have brought him and the Mahatma face-to-face for the first time in thirty-five years.
⁴⁷

So in the end it was Cripps who went. On March 3 Oliver Harvey noted in his diary, “The Cabinet are about to take an immense step [on India], an offer of complete independence like a Dominion after the war.” Drafts of the declaration were batted back and forth in the cabinet’s India Committee for a week; Churchill and Leo Amery held out against the more radical proposals of Attlee and Cripps. Linlithgow threatened to resign at the usurpation of what he saw as his constitutional role. It took all of Churchill’s powers of persuasion to get him to back down.
⁴⁸

On March 7 Churchill told Roosevelt, “We are still persevering to find some conciliatory and inspiring process.” In the end the hard-liners gave more than they got. The result was the so-called Cripps offer, which promised Indians immediate independence after the war and freedom to draw up their own constitution. In a nod to the Muslim League, provinces that refused to abide by a new constitution were free to secede on their own. Even the princely states would be allowed to bow out. The old formula that Indians must come together in unity before final independence, a key assumption behind the 1935 Government of India Act and reaching back to Edwin Montagu, died a swift and necessary death.

Literally everything would now be on the table, as long as India was willing to fight Japan. Churchill was not at all happy, realizing it would be nearly impossible to rescind an offer of independence, even if it were turned down.
⁴⁹
But he had no choice. The Americans, and Gandhi’s gloomy meeting with Chiang Kai-shek, had left him no room to maneuver.

It was with this proposal in his pocket that a hopeful Stafford Cripps left for India on March 14, 1942. He arrived on the twenty-second. Days later an American representative, Colonel Louis Johnson, arrived to help massage the deal. It was the nadir of Britain’s fortunes in Asia. The Japanese had entered Rangoon. Within days they closed the Burma Road, isolating Chiang’s army in China. The day after Cripps arrived Japanese troops occupied the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. The Japanese navy freely roamed the Indian coast, sinking Indian and neutral shipping.

Indians had always been taught that rule by Britain, whatever its shortcomings, at least kept them safe from any foreign invader. That assumption, which had propped up the Raj for the better part of a century, collapsed ignominiously overnight. Thousands of people fled Madras, fearing an imminent Japanese attack. Thousands of others arrived from Ceylon as refugees. Churchill and the Admiralty made grim plans for a last-ditch battle there to hold Trincomalee, Ceylon’s vital naval base. Then on April 5 five Japanese aircraft carriers made their way toward the island. Japanese bombers took to the air and sank the heavy cruisers
Dorsetshire
and
Cornwall
along with two other British warships. The next day the Japanese also sank the carrier
Hermes
. “Our naval forces are not strong enough to oppose this,” a weary Churchill told FDR. Disaster in India loomed, just as it had loomed over Singapore the previous December.
⁵⁰

If ever there was a time to finally settle India’s outstanding issues, this was it. But to his astonishment, Cripps found he could make no headway. The Congress was furious that the offer included the right of individual provinces to secede—a clear invitation to the creation of a separate Pakistan. The Muslim League was furious that the Congress was furious. The viceroy was furious that he had no role in negotiations that were taking place not just behind his back but in front of his face. Meanwhile Commander in Chief General Wavell worried that time would run out with nothing accomplished and that once they had digested their conquests in Burma and Malaya the Japanese would spring across the border into Assam.

Despite these immense difficulties and pressures, Cripps, Johnson, and the Congress managed to pull together a preliminary deal. It involved complicated arrangements for native ministers to take office, and even to supervise India’s defense, as part of a genuine Indian national government thinly disguised as a new executive council for the viceroy.

This was on April 9. That same afternoon the Congress negotiators had a long telephone conversation with Gandhi at Wardha. They came back to the negotiating table and announced they had to reject the entire offer. Cripps was crushed—and enraged at Gandhi, whom he assumed had sabotaged the deal. He left India on April 12, his friendship with Nehru in tatters and his trust in the good faith of Indians destroyed.

Six days earlier the first Japanese bombs had fallen near Calcutta.
⁵¹
It seemed only a miracle could stop Japan’s conquest of India now.

Chapter Twenty-six

QUIT INDIA

1942

I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

WINSTON CHURCHILL
, 1942

S
OME STILL DOUBTED THAT THE
J
APANESE
could pull it off. Nirad Chaudhuri, for example, was now working for All-India Radio in Delhi, as part of the Allied propaganda effort. “Before I left Calcutta I felt sure that the Japanese would not attempt an invasion of eastern India from Burma,” he wrote years later.
^*112
Even the news of the disastrous sinkings of British ships in the Indian Ocean, which delighted his anti-British Bengali friends, did not faze him. He sensed that a Japanese landing would bring not a massive uprising against the Raj but only more fleeing refugees.
¹

Since 1940 Chaudhuri had come to admire Winston Churchill for his single-minded and single-handed struggle against the Nazis, whom Chaudhuri saw as genuinely evil compared to India’s British masters, with their relatively mild flaws. But even Chaudhuri had to wonder. “It is not easy,” Churchill had written to FDR, “to assign limits to the Japanese aggression.”
²
If the Japanese were free to roam the Indian Ocean at will, how long would it be before the British would have to abandon India in order to protect their interests elsewhere?

Others in London had a different worry. Why had Gandhi undermined the Cripps mission? The consensus among scholars today is that he did not. Gandhi did meet Cripps, but he was adamant that he would leave all negotiations to the Congress’s official representatives, Nehru and Azad. Gandhi himself denied he ever had any contact with members of the Congress Working Committee after he left Delhi on April 5.

But others believed he did.
³
In fact, two people were actually relieved that the Cripps mission had failed. One was Churchill, who believed that the collapse of the talks would ultimately have a “beneficial” impact on his relations with the Americans and hence the war. The Americans had wanted the British to offer Indians independence. Now the British had done so, and the Indians had turned them down. Churchill could echo Cripps’s words to him in his last communication on April 11: “Now we get on with the job of defending India.”
⁴

The other man who wanted the mission to fail was certainly Gandhi. He may have had no hand in sabotaging it, but he considered the Cripps offer a “post-dated cheque on a failing bank”—too little too late. Days after Cripps left, another plan was taking shape in Gandhi’s mind. It came to him on his silence day, with the kind of intuitive stroke that had inspired his campaign against the salt tax. This plan, however, was far bolder. He confessed to his friend Horace Alexander that it “would mean courage of a higher order”—perhaps higher than India herself could achieve. But like Churchill, Gandhi had reached a point where he felt there were no choices left.
⁵

His idea was that the British should leave India. Now. Completely, immediately, and for good. “Britain cannot defend India, much less herself on Indian soil with any strength,” he told Alexander. “The best thing she can do is leave India to her fate. I feel somehow India will not do badly then.”
⁶

It was a breathtaking idea. Even if the British agreed, the logistics alone would be appalling. But the British—and Winston Churchill—would never agree. Still, Gandhi felt it was the next logical step in the campaign to finally lift the British incubus from India’s shoulders. Demonstrations of loyalty had failed, noncooperation had failed, negotiation with viceroys and even members of the British cabinet had failed. What indeed was left except forcing the British to pack up and leave—especially in the face of an irresistible Japanese advance? For by the spring of 1942 Gandhi was convinced that the Axis could no longer be resisted. (He was not alone.) Bose and his supporters seemed right: the British were going to lose. And they would bring India down with them unless he, and the Indian people, acted first.

Nor did Gandhi believe the British departure would leave India helpless before the Japanese enemy. He had actually weighed this possibility during his very first noncooperation campaign. Back in December 1920 some had said that if the British left, India would fall under foreign domination. “Imagine the worst,” Gandhi had argued against them, with uncanny prescience, “
the Japanese overwhelming us from the Bay of Bengal,
the Gurkhas from the hills, and the Pathans from the Northwest.” India would have to defend itself, Gandhi said, and nonviolently resist the invader—which was exactly what they should do against the British. What if the enemy refused to turn back? Then the Indians would have to resort to arms to drive them out. Either way, Gandhi believed, it “will be a more manly course than a helpless submission” to the Raj.
⁷

But in 1942 Gandhi had convinced himself that the Japanese did not want to conquer India. Once the British left, the reasons for the Japanese to attack would disappear. He even foresaw a free India negotiating a formal nonaggression treaty with imperial Japan.
⁸

He also rejected the notion that the withdrawal of British troops and command of the police would lead to anarchy and chaos. “Our ahimsa will remain lame as long as we do not get rid of the fear of anarchy,” he impatiently responded. “We have to take the risk of violence to shake off the great calamity of slavery.” India needed to have “unflinching faith” in nonviolence and to expect the best instead of fearing the worst: “This is the time to prove that there is no power stronger than ahimsa in the world.”
⁹

Far from turning India upside down, Gandhi expected that a concerted move to force the British out would unify the Indian National Congress, which had been shattered by the failure of the Cripps mission and desperately needed a cause to rally around. It was also the kind of satyagraha that he believed might open the door to Hindu-Muslim reconciliation. Indeed, one of his deepest worries about the Cripps offer had been that if Congress did endorse the war effort, it might trigger a fresh wave of communal violence. Once the British left, Gandhi kept telling himself, everything would work out. As he told the press, “I shall expect nonviolence to arise out of chaos.”
¹⁰

There was still one more reason why Gandhi decided on this bold, even quixotic course. In his heart he wanted to prove to Churchill and the British that Indians were not “sugar candies.” Churchill had rallied a people and a nation to fight a war for freedom that others had said could not be won. (Indeed some, including Gandhi, still believed it could not be won.) Gandhi was determined to show that he could rally a people and nation to gain their freedom
without a war
.

That previous October he had composed an editorial that is deeply revealing of his state of mind. “My faith in human nature is progressively growing,” he wrote. “I have concluded, on the basis of my experiments, that human nature can be easily molded.” At the moment “Churchill and Hitler are striving to change the nature of their countrymen by forcing and hammering violent methods on them,” Gandhi sought to prove that “ahimsa…can change human nature and
sooner than men like Churchill and Hitler can
.”
¹¹

Contrary to Churchill, it was humanity not history that constantly changed for the better. In effect, the Quit India movement would be Gandhi’s final attempt to prove that Churchill, and those who thought like him, were wrong. Now at seventy-three, it would be his last throw of the dice—a final test of his faith in his fellow man.